Wednesday, October 19, 2011

I'm a New Yorker and I know the Son of Sam story. Any New Yorker worth their salt knows much about the events of the summer of 1977, which was truly a dynamic time in NYC history.

I liked the movie Summer of Sam, which really used the Son of Sam story as a background story to other stuff that was going on. So I was hoping that Son of Sam would be an actual informative movie about the case.

This movie was more horrible than I ever could have imagined. Almost no actual facts about the case were correct. The picture quality was terrible. The dialogue was awful, and was pretty much a lot of whispering and rambling. The actor who plays David Berkowitz is pretty much in a catatonic state for most of the movie, just reading off his lines as if the paper was in front of him. There's a lot of annoying background talking that gets old after about 30 seconds. This heavily focuses on the probably-untrue claim that David Berkowitz was somehow involved in a Satanic cult. In terms of this shitty movie, the "cult" consists of a chick in a bra and some other weirdos.

Not only is the story entirely inaccurate, but pretty much no effort was put into the timeline or geography. Although the murders all took place in the Bronx and Queens, the main character is often pictured standing next to the Brooklyn Bridge. Not to mention he rides one of the "new" talking subway cars, which didn't exist until the most recent decade.

I actually liked House of the Dead, so I'm usually a little slow to rag on Ulli Lommel. But this movie was seriously one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Even if this wasn't completely erroneously pretending to be about the Son of Sam, it still would have been a pretty much unwatchable movie. Horrible, horrible, horrible. Skip at all costs.